Reality Dreamstates
by MultiFandomSF
Summary: She understands the reality she knows now is hers alone. MSR, angst, COMPLETE.
1. Suffocation

**Reality Dreamstates**

* * *

There are no words. They don't speak and they stalk away in the rain without a goodbye or hello or even I'm sorry.

* * *

The answering machine is blinking, the red light short and frantic, illuminating the room and the masking tape X he hasn't bothered to take down. Maybe he's out there someplace, helping him along from the great beyond.

* * *

The mirror was shattered and the shelf on the floor, but that was before. Now the man outside the window is in the closet or in the ceiling, and her blood is boiling with spies that send her hurtling into car trunks or places nobody goes.

* * *

The voice on the answering machine whispers through his dreams, and he listens, just one more time, in a morbid obsession of the beauty of pure terror. Then he sleeps again, her voice screaming in the back of his head and he dreams of life in the stars and how grand it used to seem.

* * *

She sleeps in silence below the stars outside. The trunk is warm and the cold seeps in from outside; it feels like she's camping again. Sooner or later they'll see the monster he whispers, and she whispers back,- he's already here, he's already here-

* * *

Others talk in the front and passenger seats, and he is haunted by the haze of the evening. He doesn't say much. The others will use him when they need to sacrifice. They always liked her red hair more than they liked his brown.

* * *

They greet each other in the morning with terse hellos. He shuts the door and she purses her lips, hangs her head and pretends to read the file on his desk. He knows if he mentions anything, she'll stalk away, the Ice Queen again, and she'll be fine forevermore. But she doesn't say a word, only looks away haughtily to hide the fear and shame. After all these years, she still hates to open up to him.

* * *

They've never admitted to the other how much their trials have broken them. It's only through nightmares and panicked phone calls made in sleep that they really see.

* * *

She called him in her sleep, screaming into the receiver, no words, just anger and sorrow and terror and grief that breaks his mind into tiny pieces. They rearrange themselves while he dreams, and he's off on every case involving her all over again in infinite combination. He dreams that night of fear and loss, it's her, always her. It's not his sister anymore, only her.

Somehow, she realizes that it was only their subconscious needs and longing that caused the evening to dissipate into shadows and terror. Somehow, their brains decided to try to show them that they did need each other; they couldn't afford to fight. Fate was giving them a way to reunite, happily, in relief, in the other's arms.

That, she thinks, is the cruelest way of all. They didn't come together because of happiness or shared joy; they came together because they were wronged. She loves him in a way, as he does her, but it is cruel and she hates every minute that they try to convince themselves otherwise. The world has forced them together and taunts them daily that they need each other like oxygen.

* * *

She needs him and wants him and vice versa but it is only because one time they suffocated together—and when the world in their minds exploded the other was all that was left.

* * *

Night comes again, and they drift off in anger that they've hurt the other and cannot do anything to alter the past. They are here in the present, and they can pretend and can comfort the other, but no amount of Future can alter the Past.

* * *

He tells her goodnight on the way out of the basement, and she tries to breathe with her head in a pillow.

* * *

A/N: Please review. X-Files not mine. 


	2. Hotel

**Hotel**

* * *

The reason is gone, and all logic in Scully's head has disappeared and taken her with it.

* * *

"Do you ever think about fate, that maybe we were meant for this—this moment, this room, everything minute we spend time uncovering truths or half truths…?"

"I don't know. It seems…I've always believed at least that there is logic and justice in the universe. The only thing that can't be quantified is the power of the human mind, I don't think I could honestly say whether everything here was fated…even if the universe is ordered in a precise pattern…do you really believe our brain patterns are available in some mysterious, concealed package, just waiting to be found out?"

* * *

She gave him her God, her belief, her science. He absorbed it all, and took it to the stars. She cannot make herself believe he was taken against his will. Mulder won whatever battles he wanted to. She knew that he had gone willingly; whether he was still there willingly was a different question. But she hated him for leaving her all the same. The least he could have done was take her with him.

* * *

Mulder!

* * *

In the stars, Mulder is alive and wishes he wasn't. He wishes Scully knew how sorry he was.

* * *

Someone stole her computer, and her poor superintendent says Mulder was here. She could almost laugh if she wasn't so desperate. She rushes to his apartment, lit with a blue green glow of his aquarium and finds nothing but reminders of moments past.

She curls up on his bed and presses her head into his sheets, pillow and shirt. His bed smells like him. It's comforting, and she relaxes as tears mar the perfection of the tangled sheets. It's comforting, but a tiny part of her knows that this bed represented nothing of Mulder.

* * *

"Do you want to know the truth, Scully?"

* * *

Autopsy, California, Incident Iowa, Little City, Crazy People, Insurrection, Dying Wishes, Farewell Kisses…

She startles awake, gasping into Mulder's bed. He was there in her head, monotonously intoning a million unconnected phrases but she knew he wasn't himself. Face impassive, tonelessly reciting utter nonsense and she believed it all.

* * *

At four in the morning, Walter Skinner enters Mulder's apartment with no noise. He observes the things left undone and moves towards the bedroom. There is nothing to be found, except Scully, curled up in his bed with his pillow and shirt pressed to her face. He checks, just in case, to make sure she's breathing, and leaves her there. He's hates that she seems destined for nothing more than this.

* * *

She dreams that Skinner takes her to a hotel, a grand, echoing hotel, where a piano player plays in the lobby, and you can look up to the top of the hotel through sky lights and see white light cascading down. She dreams of jungles in the potted plants in the downstairs—she wanders endlessly and she is void of life or expression. She is catatonic in a sea of wildness and desperation, echoes and reminders and no one else. The baby died when Mulder disappeared, she doesn't even know.

She lays in her bed, face impassive and terrorized, staring into space. Scully thinks she can see the future—she knows it—she's there right now.

* * *

Rat-a-tat Rat-a-tat, Stephen King, bumblebees, Ice Ages, Different Strokes, There Before Us, Random Notes 

Sing a Song, Sing For Me

He sings backwards, and her life unwinds.

* * *

In a different reality, she awakes and there is no John Doggett standing before her. She awakes in his empty apartment, feeds the fish, leaves. She takes a taxi to the end of the earth, stands before the precipice, and jumps off. 

She flies upwards again.

* * *

Scully wakes while it is still dark and sees Samantha Mulder in front of her. She is not dreaming, and stares, wordlessly and the 14-year old ghost in the moonlight.

* * *

Do you want to know the truth?

* * *

The world hits her, and before Samantha can open her mouth to finish, Scully is trying to scream, to scream loud enough to bring herself out of the haze or to drown out the little girl's words. Because she understands now that no fairytale ends like this, no fairy tale begins like this. This is not the stuffing of white clouds and late morning dreams, this is the madness pushed into nightmares—

But she can't scream, and she's paralyzed in fright—someone's trying to steal her heart all over again—she can't breathe or whisper and it feels like a nightmare but she knows it isn't.

* * *

-Do you want to know the truth?- 

No!

-This is all that you will ever be.-

Dana Scully recoils in the weight of everything around her, and goes back to the hotel place, because at least there, the scenery is beautiful and she can't feel a thing.

* * *

A/N 

Thanks to Spo0ky42 for a lovely review. I'm very appreciative!

Disclaimer: The X-Files are not mine.


	3. All Things That You Are

All Things That You Are

* * *

"You're not God!" 

He stares back at her, gun raised, faltering.

"YOU'RE NOT GOD!"

Do you remember the other times like these? He remembers the spitfire and thinks she's lovely when she's like this.

He puts the gun down, and she collapses, tears streaming down her face as she lowers her eyes and keeps her gun pointed at his chest.

* * *

"ARE YOU THE MAN WHO KILLED MY SISTER? 

He huddles on the ground, curled in a fetal position, she wants to shoot him because he's scared, he should be, oh he should be.

"DID YOU KILL MY SISTER? ANSWER ME!"

She never did find any answers, only petrification and rejection and secrets and lies.

The world lies, and she screams at semi-innocents in the darkness because she has nothing to hide anymore.

* * *

"Tell you a secret?" 

There's nothing and nowhere they can hide.

* * *

He lies on a hospital bed, dying from tangled dreams and unrighteous battles; she's the only one he wanted all in all, she's still the one he wants to be with now.

* * *

His legs were still tangled in the sheets when she finished dressing, walked away from him, and wished life weren't so hard.

* * *

Tell you a secret?

* * *

She had too much principle than he could ever comprehend or wish for. He sacrificed everything for her, and she came back to him in the end. It hadn't been the best ending; he knew it was just her way of getting away from him and everything that she didn't want.

* * *

They talk for a long time, and he still loves her, and she's still her. In the end she cries. 

She lays her head on his chest while he strokes her hair. Time slows, the heart monitor flat lines, and she thinks that this must be the best way to die.

* * *

All that's left are the relationships she's built. And somehow, she's never come to terms with any of them.

* * *

A/N: Thank you to all my reviewers. I'm very encouraged by them and am very grateful to anyone and everyone who takes the time to give me feedback! 

This episode was inspired by "All Things." "He" here is interchangeable with any number of people. Most of the dialogue or situational stuff is taken directly from episodes; however, the first situation used is mine.

Also, for anyone reading my other fic, "Two," it will be completed. My biggest pet peeve is when people leave fics completely unfinished, I will not do that. It will be finished, but I'm not in the correct mindset at this point.


	4. Red

FYI: The F word is used in this peice.**

* * *

**

Abduction

* * *

Mulder dreams of the color red.

Children laughing.

Playing dead.

* * *

In the desert, he can see Scully in the haze. Irrational, bright Scully shining through the mirage that is what he thinks it is.

She's but a few feet away, and he screams, "Scully!" over and over again, knowing that if she can't hear him through the irony, there is truly no God and no higher power but the infinite black of space.

* * *

Mulder dreams of the color red.

* * *

He's not where he is right now. He's lying on cold stone and his body is shouting NO while his mind asks why. After all of the signs of alien mal intent, he somehow believed in a sense of urban grandeur, beings wiser than humanity. He knew it wasn't true and he believed it all the same.

* * *

_You would laugh at me if you could see me now Scully, I look like those pictures in the abandoned chapels…the ones you stopped going to alone after a man tried to rip your heart out and you saw Emily in pairs of burned out eyes…

* * *

_

In the waking hours of sub-consciousness, Mulder swims through the deep water, treading the current and making progress towards the bottom. Touching the murky bottom, he lies down on the ethereal earth and thinks he's is too tired to make sense of anything.

* * *

He sees the dead world that they promised him, with Samantha's happy smile and arms outstretched, Diana's simple coldness and deceit, the father he never truly had. Sees the coffin that _real_ people get the honor of burial in. There are children here, some at peace and some broken, and he knows how close he was to a life that could have satisfied him until Earth was colonized and he plunged himself into deeper despair.

* * *

As the spinning saw dips towards his bare chest, he begins to scream. There is no sense to this, nothing to make any sense of the irregularities here. He has seen no one, no grey little men, no government officials. He doesn't know how he got there, and as the rusty, spinning saw stutters a bit, Mulder can't fathom why such alien power would use such silly materials as iron and would let their materials die and go to waste in a dank little room in New Mexico.

This torture seems too human to be caused by anything intelligent.

And then his coppery blood spills towards his face, and he screams because he _is _human and he can't understand why he means anything to _them_ alive.

* * *

_Mulder_.

"Scully!" he gasps in relief—she's sitting next to therock tablewhere he's lying, skin stretched and needles covering him.

She smiles, but it is not one of happiness, not her rare, stunning smile. It is one of cruelty, he thinks, and she keeps smiling as she perches on the end of the table, arms crossed, mind whirring.

"You were such a bastard, Mulder, you do know that?"

He gapes in horror, disbelief, shame and sadness. Speech has left him and in its place cold dread remains, traveling in waves down his bleeding spine.

"You wanted so much to find your sister, Mulder, to find aliens. To have someone _believe_ you. I fucking believed, Mulder, I did." She sneered at him, eyes bright with malice and cynic pride.

"And you never believed anything but they were out there and you never seemed to care that they could do harm. You watched them hurt me over and over and over again and you said you cared, but you kept looking. Did you think you could avenge me? What did you think you could do?"

He sputters, eyes wide and maybe he is crying, but he doesn't know, this has to be a dream, oh god let this be a dream…

_I don't know anymore, Scully, I'm so sorry, I don't know._

She grins at him, face evil and twisted, but still so real, and starts to speak in malicious, lilting tones.

"This is the part where they drill through the passages of your brain, Mulder. This is the part where this little drill bores its noise into your brain and implants your future. This drill, Mulder? This drill is what will rip apart all you believe in and will make this night famous when you can no longer remember it. The agony will never end, Mulder. Never."

Tears are leaking out of his eyes, and can't think anything but he's sorry.

She finishes her statement with a triumphant swell of pride, smiles in glee one last time, and turns into the darkness as the whir of drill bit echoes in the empty room.

* * *

And suddenly he is awake in a small room in Bellefleur, Oregon, arms wrapped tight around a benevolent Scully, a Scully that he knows and loves more than anything.

But he is only dreaming.

* * *

A/N: Thanks for all the reviews! I'm very happy to be getting a response. This piece is set as a parallel to "Hotel." 


	5. Asteroid

**Asteroid

* * *

**

After he is abducted, Scully sees Mulder everywhere. It is never a dream or a hallucination, he is simply there. In the waking hours or the starry nights, she finds him sleeping on her couch or shivering in the curtains, with deep shadowed eyes that echo more pain than she thinks she can comprehend.

The visits aren't frequent by any means; he comes once or twice every month—if she's lucky. Usually after a particularly hard week, when Doggett's been on her case and her hormones have been driving her crazy. Usually after she's spent mornings in bed, wondering what good it is to get up anymore, or when she's spent nights sobbing into her pillow.

She doesn't understand life without him. She never understood it with him either.

* * *

After the Mary Hendershot incident, she comes back to her lonely apartment to find him standing by the window, with an empathetic look on his weathered face. Mulder takes her face in his hands, plants a kiss on her forehead and embraces her while she sobs. Scully asks him when he's coming back, and he replies that he's trying, god how he's trying.

She tells him all about the X-Files, Doggett, Skinner, everything that happens even though she senses he already knows. And he sits next to her in the living room while they drink beer, and she tries to make him tell her where he is and what they're doing to him.

All he does is shake his head, and then he gets up—as if to leave—and she catches him from behind, embraces him, and when she wakes, he is gone.

* * *

It is never a dream or a hallucination. He is there. When she unlocks her door to find him, Scully is never overjoyed or shocked. She never jumps for joy or runs to embrace him. In fact, she never has. He is there, and she is there, and it is simply another form of existence. It is a tired world, a worn caress and weary smilebetween the two of them. He _is_ there, and she has tried time and time again to convince herself otherwise.

She moves towards him as if it were a dream, emotions dampened, mind running slowly but clearly still. But it is never a dream. And she wishes it were that way more than anything.

* * *

The mornings after are always the hardest; Scully wakes to find him gone. Even though it happens every time, it is always a harder grief to deal with.

Those are the days when she goes to work and listlessly does her job, stays at Mul—Doggett's desk while John goes to the cafeteria to eat with people less depressing, and holds Mulder's nameplate—running her fingers over the carved surface and wondering where's he's been. Wondering where he is and where he's going. _He's an asteroid_, she thinks later, _He hits everything in his path, damages them, disappears forever into the blackness of a universe to vast to comprehend_. Later, damages becomes "irrevocably alters." She can't stand to love somebody she resents so much.

* * *

Scully wakes in the early mornings, dreams in the late nights, lives asleep in her waking hours. She thinks maybe she went to bed in the Bellefleur room and never woke up again.

Maybe she'll wake up someday, and it will still be the day Mulder held her in his arms and he will still be sleeping; she'll be eons older and it will only have taken a second.

* * *

The bright sun shines through her bedroom window, and Mulder is asleep next to her. He is not a dream or a hallucination. He is not real in any accepted sense. But he is there.

She decides to sleep in today.

* * *

A/N: Thanks to my 5 reviewers. I love you very much.

This piece was inspired by some very weird impressions of the X-Files I had in the days before I started watching it.


	6. Trust No 1

**Trust No 1****

* * *

**

Her life is a film strip, episodes upon episodes, cases and adventures and love and defeat. Each in its own frame, paralleling events and diverging. Such character development she's had, Scully thinks. What these nine years have been.

* * *

Mulder came back to her, alive, dead, in a dream. She doesn't know. And then she sent him away, and perhaps, she's the only one that truly exists. Now that she's banished him, maybe he doesn't even live outside her memory.

* * *

I am the child she's been given to drive her mad.

* * *

In the background, there are piano chimes and hymns, sung in her name, her honor. In the background, there is the ever present soundtrack that is hers alone. It's on a loop, on a repeat. Scully's categorized her feelings: With Mulder, Without Mulder, Rebelling against Mulder, Loving Mulder, Partner, Friend, Dead. And each time a situation arises, she has an emotion, ready, waiting. Always.

* * *

We are the ploy that she sees and believes, but knows all the while just how it will end.

* * *

Trust No One. Hah. Mulder, she thinks, I trusted you. Shouldn't have, but I did. Mulder, she thinks, I trusted humanity. Shouldn't have, but did.

* * *

I am the Man you've seen times before.

* * *

Doggett tells her this could be a lie, a joke, a way to get to Mulder. She thinks it's probably true, ascertains as much on her own. But if Mulder was dead maybe she could lapse into a single emotion, wouldn't have to think anymore.

* * *

I am Monica Reyes. In another lifetime I was burnt at the stake for what I know, what I understand. In another place or time, I was Mulder too.

* * *

The man, she could swear she's seen him twice before, takes her on a wild goose chase, as she's always done. It's a routine. And when he makes her undress for a completely unsubstantiated reason, Scully never considers it could be for the sick pleasure of seeing her semi-naked. Afterwards, she can't but think it was nothing more than a part of the plot, something put there to prove a theory.

* * *

I am John Doggett. I would die if it meant I could make her smile, just damn once. I've been trustworthy and a friend, wish I was something more. To someone, once, maybe I was. Someday they'll shoot me in the back, and I'll take the bullet knowing that at least someone else won't get shot.

* * *

The movie ends and there are no answers, no denials, no truths or half-truths. Only the ineveitable cliffhanger and tears on her part: Without Mulder.

* * *

My name is Dana Scully. I am in love with Fox Mulder. I am in love with a man in my mind. Once upon a time I was alive. Now I don't see the difference between myself and the cadavers I work with. Life is made out of cookie cutter shapes. I am not meant for anything but the tragedy, the tears, the angst. I was more than a one-dimensional character once, but now…this is all I was ever destined to be.

* * *

Some contrived, some brilliant, some battering and bloody beaten to a pulp. She's had so many episodes in her life. And she knows, someone, somewhere, has taken every image in her life and put them together in a film that takes less than half an hour to view.

* * *

I am a baby girl in the arms of my mother. Someone takes me and puts me in a car. They drive away and I am never seen again.

* * *

A/N: This was written post, "Trust No 1." The fic itself is both that, a fanfiction, and a comment on this particular episode. Unlike many (I think), I thought this episode was just another low-grade, mythology never-ending plotline where the twistswere prewritten in a billion other episodes we've ever seen. It was a distinct episode in some ways, some parts of it struck chords, else I wouldn't have written this. However, in many ways, this piece is my critique of the series, of Scully's character and of the series' overall caliber, season 9.

Thanks for reading! Please review.

P.S.- My "Two" fic is complete. If you never started reading it, I beg you to give it a chance, give me a review.


	7. This is the end

**This is the end

* * *

**

She is tired of the insipid "Dana," when has he ever called her Dana?

* * *

Doggett and Reyes—she never stopped calling him Agent even after a year or however long it was.

* * *

Mulder. She doesn't think she called him Fox more than once. If she did, she knows it didn't matter.

Scully. Scully, she thinks, that is my name. Dana is dead.

Dana has been dead for a long time.

* * *

She thinks her mother is the only one who truly notices. Her mother who watched her scream for her child and for Mulder and for pain as she was thrown across the room, as she kicked in a door and destroyed a man for touching her baby.

Scully knows her mother watched _that_ display and wished she were dead instead of lying and faking all of the time.

And now he was back. Mulder, in the flesh. And to make everyone happy, to make everyone thrilled that they've gotten her beloved back, she feigns more. Feigns she's happy, pretends everything will be beautiful now that she has her Mulder back.

In her own head, it is impossible to pretend that having Mulder back will replace a life of happiness and calm.

In her head, she never sleeps, and screams instead. She screams at Mulder, screams that she would rather die than spend her life running. Because days will become eons, and their chatter will stop. They have said everything worth saying, and they have left no rock unturned. They communicate without words, and she is so sorry.

This story comes with no happy ending. Their relationship was always tragic. She knew it when she began.

Dana Scully regrets everything.

And she knows any story will have her happy, fighting till the end, content in a new world she survived.

And she will know that the stories will be false.

So when Mulder tells her he didn't wish the truth on her shoulders, because he feared it would crush her spirit, she wanted to laugh

She wanted to scream, wanted to strangle him, wanted to die in the throes of feeling instead of numbed pain and grave anger. Because how dare he, how dare _Mulder_, tell her that she did not deserve the truth after he had abandoned her. After she had given up her child, after she had lost her sister, after she had been abducted.

How dare he keep from her what she had already died seeking.

But it is the last part she laughs about.

She thinks, _Oh Mulder, you crushed me years ago_, and wants to hit him, kiss him, and beat him senseless until the blood runs cold under her tiny fists.

But Dana Scully is dead.

Only she remains. And she doesn't care enough to bother.

He moves on to the bed and he holds her in her arms. She does not struggle and instead looks into his eyes and lies to him.

_There is no hope_.

And she thinks that later, in the years of running and hiding and silence, there will be warm bathtubs, high cliffs and razors; guns and pills and pillows.

She need only wait till one strikes her fancy.

(she has always loved warm baths)

Dana Scully regrets so much.

Scully knows it is all her fault.

She understands the reality she knows now is hers alone.

* * *

In a dark room, a naïve man holds a woman who pretends she is living.

In a dark room, the world has already ended.

This was never a fairytale, and it never had a happy ending.

This is the end.

* * *

A/N: The X-Files are not mine.

I hope you enjoyed reading, I'd love a review if you haven't already left one.

For those who have left one, I'm very grateful. Each one makes me just one bit happier :).

Thank you for your time, for your thoughts.

Enjoy.


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